I admit, I didn’t enjoy The Clocks as much as I did Dumb Witness. Nothing against Dame Agatha’s writing; it’s just that this one has elements of espionage in it, and I much prefer domestic crimes rooted in family dramas.

I’m also afraid that my eagerness to try another Agatha Christie over the holidays, I may break my victorious end to the year. I honestly didn’t expect to get through it so quickly, and that may be because, unlike with Dumb Witness, I figured this one had a spy-related solution and so didn’t really bother trying to solve it. At least until just pages before the big reveal, when I realized that, spy elements or no, I simply can’t resist trying to outsmart the Queen of Crime at every turn.

Here’s the set-up: freelance typist Sheila Webb is called to No. 19 Wilbraham Crescent, the home of Miss Pebmarsh, for a last-minute job. The door is unlatched, so even if Miss Pebmarsh isn’t home when Sheila arrives, she should just let herself into the sitting room to the right of the entrance. Sheila does so, and stumbles onto a dead body. As she’s processing the fact, Miss Pebmarsh arrives home. It turns out Miss Pebmarsh is blind, so Sheila warns her about the dead body, and runs out of the house screaming into the arms of Colin Lamb, who happens to be passing by. Colin is “officially” a marine biologist, but is really a spy. He’s friends with Hercule Poirot, who’s retired and kinda depressed, so Colin takes him the case to cheer him up.

Some elements of curiosity:

• Sheila’s boss says that Miss Pebmarsh asked for her specifically, but Sheila doesn’t know why as she hasn’t ever done work with Miss Pebmarsh before. More oddly, Miss Pebmarsh denies making the call in the first place.
• Sheila enters the house at around.3 pm; Miss Pebmarsh’s cuckoo clock chimes the hour. But there are four clocks in the room that are turned to the time 4:13. Miss Pebmarsh denies having those clocks at all. Later, as Inspector Hardcastle is about to take the clocks into evidence, he finds only three.
• Inspector Hardcastle finds a business card on the dead man, but when he investigates, both the man’s name and his company don’t seem to exist.
• During the inquest, Sheila’s co-worker Edna says that something couldn’t have happened the way one of the witnesses says it did. Shortly after, she turns up dead.

Somewhat ancillary to this, but possibly related, Colin is in the area because he’s investigating a person of interest. His only clue is the number 61, the letter W, and a drawing of a crescent. Living at No. 61 Wilbraham Crescent is an engineer who seems shady in that he’s bad at his job, but not necessarily the kind of shady that Colin is looking for.

Through both Colin and Inspector Hardcastle’s investigations, we meet a whole cast of characters in the neighbourhood, including an overworked mom whose husband is away for long stretches of time, a woman with 14 or 19 cats (different characters have different counts), and a few more. Poirot plays armchair detective in this one, literally, relying on Colin to share all possible clues while Poirot’s little grey cells do their work.

And while I didn’t quite put as much effort into solving this case as I usually do with other Agatha Christie cases, I’m somewhat (arrogantly) confident I know what happened. So I’m locking in my guess, with equal confidence that I will be wrong and my lack of interest in spy fiction kept me from picking up most of the relevant clues.

Did I Solve It?

LOL, no not at all. And even when I thought through a significant clue with a 50/50 chance of getting it right, I chose the wrong answer. Ironically, my proposed solution did somewhat touch on the answer to the espionage case Colin was working on, so I guess in this particular story, I turned out to be a better spy than detective!

*** SPOILERS BELOW ***

My Verdict

I think Miss Pebmarsh did it.

I think she’s faking her blindness, or at least the extent of its severity. A few characters commented how she walks around as confidently as if she can see, and without even using a cane, so I think she actually can see.

The clocks set at 4:13 are red herrings, set to make the detectives think there’s something super significant about the time, when really, they don’t mean anything. They also help take suspicion off Miss Pebmarsh, because why would a blind woman set four clocks to the wrong time?

She chose Sheila Webb because of Sheila’s first name Rosemary. Miss Pebmarsh happens to have a clock with the name Rosemary on it, and she wants to throw suspicion on Sheila. I admit, I previously suspected Sheila of being the murderer, but Colin is super in love with her, and Agatha Christie tends to have a soft spot for young lovers in her books.

Who’s the victim? Possibly Miss Pebmarsh’s husband, or someone from her past? I’m guessing she’s involved in espionage somehow, possibly by sending messages through her job teaching Braille at the school for disabled kids, and the man from her past could jeopardize her security by revealing her true identity.

I also think Colin’s envelope with the 61, W, and crescent, are written upside down, and it should be 19 instead of 61. No idea what the M means, possibly Miss Martindale, who runs the typing service where Sheila works? Or maybe it’s Miss Pebmarsh’s real name? Eh, it’s a spy thing, so not really something that interests me. I’m just guessing the murder is much simpler than the set-up suggests.

As to what Edna noticed at the inquest, I honestly have no clue. I’ve re-read that scene and the initial chapters several times, and can’t find an inconsistency. Miss Pebmarsh barely said anything at the inquest, so if someone were lying, my money would be on Sheila or Miss Martindale. I think Sheila is more likely to be the liar, only because Edna broke her shoe close to work, and I feel like that’s significant somehow in disproving Sheila’s story about where she was during her lunch period. My gut is that Sheila is also a spy, but did not murder the man. (I hope she didn’t murder Edna either!) And that this somehow leads to her and Colin’s happily ever after, because now they can go on espionage adventures together like Tommy and Tuppence.

What Actually Happened

Miss Martindale killed the man. Edna realized this at the inquest. Because she broke her shoe, she had to cut her lunch short, which meant she knew for a fact that no one called Miss Martindale at 1:49 like she claimed.

I did wonder about the call possibly being fake, but ultimately decided on Sheila being the liar, because I couldn’t figure out why Miss Martindale would have killed the man. She also seemed a much less prominent character than Sheila or Miss Pebmarsh, so I figured she was just a side character. Which goes to show how easily Dame Agatha fooled me on this case.

Miss Martindale’s motive is that she’s the sister of Mrs. Bland, the wife of the shady engineer at No. 61. Mrs. Bland inherited money from a dead relative, because she was the only living relative remaining. But because she actually mentions still having a sister, Poirot sussed out that the inheritance went to the wrong Mrs. Bland; she was the second wife and the inheritance belonged to the first. The man who was killed knew the Mrs. Bland who should have gotten the money, and that’s why Miss Martindale kills him.

And Miss Pebmarsh is a spy, doing stuff through the school for disabled children that she teaches at. She really is blind, but she is also super deadly. And, randomly, she happens to be Sheila Webb’s mom. I thought that plot thread would come up somewhere, somehow.

My ego would like to think that with a bit more effort, I could have solved this one, but more than likely, I would have just overthought it and accused one of the neighbours instead. Possibly the woman with all the cats, just because!